If such “moments” shook Obama’s mask — urbane, fair, colorblind — this month shattered it. In San Francisco — “elitism’s epicenter,” said The New York Times’ Maureen Dowd — the Democratic candidate explained to donors why the working class mistrusts him. Among friends, Obama engaged in true confession, his Weltanschauung rocking the campaign.

Small-town America, he began, feels angst, whereupon it becomes “bitter … cling(ing) to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigration sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” In short, sites siring the vast majority of U.S. presidents — Dixon, Plains, Yorba Linda, Hope – harbor gun-obsessed, immigrant-hating, religious-crazed rubes.

Rogers and Hart wrote “bewitched, bothered and bewildered.” Obama’s worldview is biased and belittling. It demeans small-town/rural America’s 60 million residents. It smears others who, unlike Obama, think that what we are matters more than what we have. In 20 seconds, he forged the worst would-be president’s botch since George Romney rued “being brainwashed” in 1967.

Specifically, start with guns. I don’t hunt. My un-bitter father did, liking its bonhomie and tradition. Next, consider religion in the world’s most devout developed nation. Hillary Clinton put it best, becoming Joe Six Pack’s unlikely Joan of Arc: Americans “embrace faith not because they are materially poor (a crutch), but because they are spiritually rich (a shield).”

“Antipathy to (different) people”? Main Street more likes, say, San Francisco than Baghdad on the Bay does it. “Anti-immigrant sentiment”? Middle America simply wants border security. “Anti-trade sentiment”? What small-towners loathe is corporate outsourcing and cheap labor. Hilariously, Barack has attacked unfair trade. Only hypocrisy tops his sense of superiority.

“Snob-ama is not just out of touch. He’s on another planet,” wrote Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Michael Goodwin. Added Clinton, rightly if self-servingly: “We don’t want a president who looks down at us. We want a president who stands up for us.” How could Obama be so disdainful of all things bourgeoisie? By not knowing what he doesn’t know.

Reared in Mayberry, many later work in MetroAmerica. They understand its strengths and weaknesses: intolerance, above all. By contrast, urban swells grasp nothing of small-town America — like Indonesia, Chicago, and Harvard Law’s Obama, deeming it extraterrestrial — thus, grotesquely caricature people far less arrogant and supercilious than secular liberalism’s hip and pop culture elite.

Barack’s ignorance is gaping. Duplicity is worse. Obamamania hallucinates that a far-left U.S. senator — yes to a handgun ban, early prison release for sexual predators and late-term abortion — will somehow unite a right-center country. “Guns and religion” show another farce. A “devout Christian,” as Obama terms himself, would never call rural faith “bitter.” Christianity’s core is love, not spite, the kindly light that led.

According to the Rasmussen Poll, only liberals share Obama’s animus. Overall, just 25 percent back his jihad against God, tradition, and reverence for everything American. The other 75 include the working-class, Reagan Democrats without whom Obama’s party has routinely lost, and will surely lose again.

Obama may still take the Democratic nomination. Yet what has the rookie gaffer learned? Refusing to recant prejudice, he hectors the middle class for guns, faith, and marriage “distracting” from “the real issues” — what he thinks we should care about. Karl Marx called “religion the opium of the people.” Such condescension is unlikely to prevail this fall.

Only God knows who is a bigot. What America knows is that Obama speaks as a bigot would. Under his mask lurks — what? A man alien to what he purports to be. Obama is clearly an elitist. It is fair to ask if he is also a fraud.

Curt Smith is a former presidential speechwriter, author of 12 books, and host of WXXI Radio’s “Perspectives,” at 2 p.m. Saturday and 11 p.m. Tuesday. His views do not necessarily reflect the station’s. E-mail: curtsmith@netacc.net